Monday, September 7, 2015

How does the West look at India? The Western public
is completely, and the professional India-watchers largely, dependent on
information filtered by a Delhi bottleneck under firm Nehruvian control. This
is not a matter of “sepoy” intellectuals blackening India and Hinduism at the
behest of an American conspiracy. It is a two-way influence, with Indians trying
to live up to Western fashions and Westerners trying to align with Indian
ideological norms.

An important new book exemplifies this American-Indian cooperation against any
political mobilization in the name of Hinduism: Pluralism and Democracy in
India. Debating the Hindu Right (OUP, New York 2015). It is a collection of
twenty essays mostly based on updated versions of contributions to a 2005
conference in Chicago. The editors are religious historian Wendy Doniger and
law scholar Martha Nussbaum, both from the top-ranking University of Chicago. Doniger’s
name has gained some currency in India ever since her book The Hindus, an
Alternative History, was withdrawn by the publisher under Hindu pressure.
This way, a biased, flippant and error-ridden book, already exposed in detail
in Vishal Agarwal’s counter-book, was given a false aura of martyrdom. The
episode also confirmed her enmity for any Hindu self-assertion, as is obvious
from the introduction she co-authored with Nussbaum.

About the outspokenly partisan perspective of the
book, we can be brief because no attempt is made to hide it. Thus, if we are
going to discuss "democracy in India", it should be hard to leave the
Emergency and the Sangh Parivar's opposition to it unmentioned; yet these are
carefully and completely hushed up. The year Zero of the book's time horizon is
explicitly said to be 2002, because of the Gujarat riots. On these, the old
progressive party-line is still strictly observed, assuming “Modi’s complicity
in the riots” (p.14). Herewith, they consciously overrule the fact that “he has
not been convicted in court” (p.1), though not for want of trying. But if riots
are deemed so important, surely attention is paid to the far larger killing of
the Sikhs in 1984 by Congress secularists; or to the East Bengali massacre of
Hindus in 1971 that dwarfed all Indian communal killings since Independence
combined? No, this book only notices killings when Hindus are (or can be
portrayed as) the perpetrators.

The Ayodhya controversy is mentioned a number of
times, but without the decisive information, quite new to the American target
audience, that the temple claim has meanwhile proved historically correct. The
whole lambasting of the centuries-old pro-temple consensus, challenged by the
secularists in 1989 and rebaptized the “Hindu fundamentalist claim”, carried
along all of American academe, yet it was wrong. The paper specifically about “the road from
Ayodhya” has 40 footnotes, all referring to partisan anti-Hindutva sources
except for one in which BJP stalwart Ram Madhav provides some hard data. And
that count is representative for most papers, but then Hindus should admit that
they themselves have produced few intellectual works worth quoting.

The editors call Naredra Modi’s accession to power
“ominous for India’s very future as a democracy” (p.1). In American academe,
the demand of objectivity, on which scholarly authority is based, is suspended
in works about Hindu politics.

The subtitle could suggest that a debate with the
so-called Hindu Right is being envisaged. That is not the case. The debate is
in fact between different sections of the secularist Left (with its American
extension), as exemplified by Amartya Sen’s response to Ramachandra Guha’s
review of his The Argumentative Indian.
The Hindu Right is only an object. The token contribution from Ved Nanda as
former head of the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh (US section of the RSS) has no argumentative
thrust, it merely details all the historical and numerical facts about Hinduism
in the US.

Yet, many of the separate papers in this book are
certainly worth reading. Most papers require a review in themselves, but to
settle for one example, Mushirul Hasan’s paper on the BJP’s textbook’s reforms
provides interesting data on the BJP’s intellectual agenda as seen by the secularists. Once you have accepted that this is not
a scholarly account but a veteran’s memoir giving the view of one of the
warring camps, it becomes a very worthy read. Incidentally, on p.255, Hasan
labels Hindu history-rewriting an “attempt to Talibanise India’s history”, thus
holding up an Islamic movement as the level to which Hindus could stoop. Thereby,
he implicitly admits that the ideologically streamlined textbooks which he
fights in India are a routine fact of life in Pakistan.

A serious drawback of this book is that it narrows
its focus to the Sangh Parivar, all while announcing a treatment of the “Hindu
Right”. Perhaps this was still passable in 2005, but anyone moderately informed
about the ideological scene should know that it is not in 2015. At the mass
level, scholars ought to have noticed that the Hindu self-defence network in
West Bengal, Hindu Samhati, has been set up by a dissatisfied ex-Swayamsevak because the RSS
was just not living up to its promises. The Sangh’s enemies, such as the
editors of this book, portray it as a formidable Hindu force, but insiders know
better. It might have number, and today it might even hold office, but its
commitment to Hindu victory is wobbly and lackadaisical. More and more, Hindus
are locally organizing outside the Sangh. They even continue to do so now that
“their” side is in power in Delhi and proving to be no more than time-servers.
Mostly they are happy that Modi is at the helm, but for an actual Hindu
dimension to politics, more will be needed.

While this trend is still marginal, it is already
very visible on the media front, where internet papers have become the arteries
of new communities shedding the Sangh baggage and trying to serve the Hindu
cause through new analyses: VijayVaani, India Facts, Hindu Human Rights,
Swarajya, Bharat-Bharati, the India Inspires Foundation. These people have no
power yet, but they do have ideas. More up-to-date and more aware of
international trends in political thinking than the gerontocratic Sangh, their
thought is far more interesting. It also is more rooted, more Hindu than the
Hindutva current, which is stuck in the 1920s’ borrowed nationalist paradigm. If
“debate” with the Hindu side is what you want, it is they who are the ones to
talk to.

About Me

Koenraad Elst (°Leuven 1959) distinguished himself early on as eager to learn and to dissent. After a few hippie years he studied at the KU Leuven, obtaining MA degrees in Sinology, Indology and Philosophy. After a research stay at Benares Hindu University he did original fieldwork for a doctorate on Hindu nationalism, which he obtained magna cum laude in 1998.
As an independent researcher he earned laurels and ostracism with his findings on hot items like Islam, multiculturalism and the secular state, the roots of Indo-European, the Ayodhya temple/mosque dispute and Mahatma Gandhi's legacy. He also published on the interface of religion and politics, correlative cosmologies, the dark side of Buddhism, the reinvention of Hinduism, technical points of Indian and Chinese philosophies, various language policy issues, Maoism, the renewed relevance of Confucius in conservatism, the increasing Asian stamp on integrating world civilization, direct democracy, the defence of threatened freedoms, and the Belgian question. Regarding religion, he combines human sympathy with substantive skepticism.